Charles Hailey | |
---|---|
Alma mater | Cornell University Columbia University |
Known for | NuSTAR General Antiparticle Spectrometer |
Awards | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Outstanding Achievement Award (three-time recipient) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Experimental physics Astrophysics |
Institutions | Columbia University |
Charles James "Chuck" Hailey is an experimental astrophysicist and Pupin Professor of Physics at Columbia University. He earned his BA in physics from Cornell University in 1977 and his PhD from Columbia in 1983, with a thesis entitled "The Development of an Imaging Gas Scintillation Proportional Counter for Use in X-ray Astronomy." He received tenure from Columbia University in 1995. [1] Hailey's research focuses on high energy astrophysics and experimental particle physics. He is co-director of the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory, where he works on gamma-ray and X-ray research. [1]
Hailey led the team that built the NASA Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) telescope. [2] One of NuSTAR's main advantages, the use of slumping glass instead of polishing to achieve high resolution, was developed by Hailey himself. [3] He continues to be very involved in the project, investigating emissions from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way as well as the sources of other X-ray and gamma emissions. Hailey is the chair of the NuSTAR Galactic Plane Survey working group. [4]
Hailey is also Principal Investigator and leader of the General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) experiments, for which he works on developing new Si(Li) detectors for X-ray detection. [5] One of the aims of the project is to attempt to detect dark matter and elucidate its composition by sending a balloon-suspended apparatus to search for anti-deuterons in the cosmic rays. The project had a successful prototype run in 2012 in Japan and is scheduled for a full run from Antarctica in 2019. [2]
Hailey previously served as V/L-Division program leader for Space Science and Technology at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1986 to 1995. In addition, he held the post of associate program leader for Intelligence and National Security Technology in the Nonproliferation, Arms Control and International Security Directorate until joining the faculty at Columbia. [6] At Livermore, Hailey received the prestigious Outstanding Achievement Award three times. [6] Before that, he was employed as a research scientist in a now-defunct private firm building X-ray detectors. [2]
He has made a variety of contributions to physics outside GAPS and NuSTAR. He has built or helped to build telescopes such as the three-meter telescope at the Lick Observatory and the High-Energy Focusing Telescope. [7] He was a member of the UK Dark Matter Collaboration and collaborated with two other Columbia faculty members to build the liquid scintillator veto shield for the ZEPLIN-III dark matter detector. [8] As part of a collaboration between researchers at Harvard and Columbia, Hailey worked on the EXIST All-Sky Sky Gamma-ray Survey mission study in 2000 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. [9] Hailey holds several patents for his work on NuSTAR and GAPS, among other projects, and has authored over 200 publications. He teaches an undergraduate quantum mechanics course at Columbia.
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), previously known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is a Flagship-class space telescope launched aboard the Space ShuttleColumbia during STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64-hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2023.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit. Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter. Another instrument aboard Fermi, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, is being used to study gamma-ray bursts and solar flares.
A scintillator is a material that exhibits scintillation, the property of luminescence, when excited by ionizing radiation. Luminescent materials, when struck by an incoming particle, absorb its energy and scintillate. Sometimes, the excited state is metastable, so the relaxation back down from the excited state to lower states is delayed. The process then corresponds to one of two phenomena: delayed fluorescence or phosphorescence. The correspondence depends on the type of transition and hence the wavelength of the emitted optical photon.
The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) was a space observatory detecting photons with energies from 20 keV to 30 GeV, in Earth orbit from 1991 to 2000. The observatory featured four main telescopes in one spacecraft, covering X-rays and gamma rays, including various specialized sub-instruments and detectors. Following 14 years of effort, the observatory was launched from Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-37 on April 5, 1991, and operated until its deorbit on June 4, 2000. It was deployed in low Earth orbit at 450 km (280 mi) to avoid the Van Allen radiation belt. It was the heaviest astrophysical payload ever flown at that time at 16,300 kilograms (35,900 lb).
MAGIC is a system of two Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes situated at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, at about 2200 m above sea level. MAGIC detects particle showers released by gamma rays, using the Cherenkov radiation, i.e., faint light radiated by the charged particles in the showers. With a diameter of 17 meters for the reflecting surface, it was the largest in the world before the construction of H.E.S.S. II.
A gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) is an instrument for measuring the distribution of the intensity of gamma radiation versus the energy of each photon. The study and analysis of gamma-ray spectra for scientific and technical use is called gamma spectroscopy, and gamma-ray spectrometers are the instruments which observe and collect such data. Because the energy of each photon of EM radiation is proportional to its frequency, gamma rays have sufficient energy that they are typically observed by counting individual photons.
The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) is an experiment in astroparticle physics to search for axions originating from the Sun. The experiment, sited at CERN in Switzerland, was commissioned in 1999 and came online in 2002 with the first data-taking run starting in May 2003. The successful detection of solar axions would constitute a major discovery in particle physics, and would also open up a brand new window on the astrophysics of the solar core.
NuSTAR is a NASA space-based X-ray telescope that uses a conical approximation to a Wolter telescope to focus high energy X-rays from astrophysical sources, especially for nuclear spectroscopy, and operates in the range of 3 to 79 keV.
Astroparticle physics, also called particle astrophysics, is a branch of particle physics that studies elementary particles of astronomical origin and their relation to astrophysics and cosmology. It is a relatively new field of research emerging at the intersection of particle physics, astronomy, astrophysics, detector physics, relativity, solid state physics, and cosmology. Partly motivated by the discovery of neutrino oscillation, the field has undergone rapid development, both theoretically and experimentally, since the early 2000s.
Cornelis A. "Neil" Gehrels was an American astrophysicist specializing in the field of gamma-ray astronomy. He was Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) from 1995 until his death, and was best known for his work developing the field from early balloon instruments to today's space observatories such as the NASA Swift mission, for which he was the principal investigator. He was leading the WFIRST wide-field infrared telescope forward toward a launch in the mid-2020s. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The European Underground Rare Event Calorimeter Array (EURECA) is a planned dark matter search experiment using cryogenic detectors and an absorber mass of up to 1 tonne. The project will be built in the Modane Underground Laboratory and will bring together researchers working on the CRESST and EDELWEISS experiments.
Gamma-ray astronomy is the astronomical observation of gamma rays, the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation, with photon energies above 100 keV. Radiation below 100 keV is classified as X-rays and is the subject of X-ray astronomy.
X-ray astronomy detectors are instruments that detect X-rays for use in the study of X-ray astronomy.
The ZEPLIN-III dark matter experiment attempted to detect galactic WIMPs using a 12 kg liquid xenon target. It operated from 2006 to 2011 at the Boulby Underground Laboratory in Loftus, North Yorkshire. This was the last in a series of xenon-based experiments in the ZEPLIN programme pursued originally by the UK Dark Matter Collaboration (UKDMC). The ZEPLIN-III project was led by Imperial College London and also included the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh in the UK, as well as LIP-Coimbra in Portugal and ITEP-Moscow in Russia. It ruled out cross-sections for elastic scattering of WIMPs off nucleons above 3.9 × 10−8 pb from the two science runs conducted at Boulby.
General antiparticle spectrometer (GAPS) is a planned experiment that will use a high-altitude balloon flying in Antarctica to look for antideuteron particles from outer space cosmic rays, in an effort to search for dark matter. Anti-deuterons could perhaps be produced by the annihilation of hypothetical weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The goal of the GAPS experiment is to capture anti-deuterons in a target material, to form an exotic atom in an excited state. The exotic atom would quickly decay, producing detectable X-rays energies with pion signature from nuclear annihilation.
Multi-messenger astronomy is astronomy based on the coordinated observation and interpretation of signals carried by disparate "messengers": electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and cosmic rays. They are created by different astrophysical processes, and thus reveal different information about their sources.
Elena Aprile is an Italian-American experimental particle physicist. She has been a professor of physics at Columbia University since 1986. She is the founder and spokesperson of the XENON Dark Matter Experiment. Aprile is well known for her work with noble liquid detectors and for her contributions to particle astrophysics in the search for dark matter.
Kerstin Perez is an Associate Professor of Particle Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is interested in physics beyond the standard model. She leads the silicon detector program for the General AntiParticle Spectrometer (GAPS) and the high-energy X-ray analysis community for the NuSTAR telescope array.